It's been a while since our latest platform review. Today we take a look at Intel's Ibex Peak platform. Wewould like to thank Mindfactory for providing the CPUs for our testing, because Intel was not able to supply us with samples.

For some reason Intel decided to split the 5th generation chipset into four distinctive models. The differences are so small that you can be sure it's just the same chip but with some functions fused off. While the P55 chipset is able to split the CPU integrated PCIe 2.0 x16 lanes into two x8 lanes, the H and Q brothers can't do that. Intel decided to fuse of two PCIe x1 lanes on the H55, so you get only six, while H57, Q57 and P55 support eight of them. These lanes are crippled, even if Intel states they are not. The lanes run at just 250MB/s which makes it impossible to attach a USB 3.0 controller with the required bandwidth directly, so some companies, for example MSI, are using a PCIe switch to combine two PCIe x1 lanes to connect the NEC USB 3.0 chip. With the next generation of chipsets this limitation will be lifted and PCIe 2.0 x1 lanes will run at full speed, but of course, you have to swap the entire system, because Intel thinks they need to grab your hard earned money and change the socket again. The standard H55 is also crippled by removing RAID support which can be done by software anyways.

So the reason for having three chipsets for the new CPUs is beyond our understanding, it's obviously just to confuse consumers and squeeze out more cash from them. While in the "good old days" you got two chips, northbridge and southbridge, this is now a single chip and it replaces the southbridge. But of course the price has remained the same, so the profits for Intel are nearly doubled out of thin air.

OS: All tests are performed with XP SP3. As 64-bit software is still not very common, we stick with the 32-bit version. We will change to Windows 7 when we swap the graphics card for a DX11 capable one.